Geography

Jamestown Makes It

In Chapter 9, Jamestown becomes rich, rich from tobacco. Peopel were getting rich from tobacco. As people got rich, they wanted more money. To get more money, you needed land, tobacco, and people to work for you. So people wanted workers so much that they were willing to pay and get criminals and poor people. They served as indentured servants. Soon enough, they were sending Africans who probably started out as indentured servants and then slaves. That's how slavery began.

[Alex #10 - Rm 27]

Jamestown Makes It

The English settlers found tabacco, the tabacco changed the English lives, the settler's lives, the African-American lives, and the Indian's (the Powhatans) lives. King James thought that tabacco was bad for you and he was right. Tabacoo is bad for you but it was very money-making. Since it took alot of time inorder to make tabacoo, the English enslaved Africans who got kidnapped from their homes. The Africans had to grow the tabacco for the English men who owned them. The African-Americans were unhappy about being owned by English men and having to work for them.

[Ju #30 - Rm 27]

Jamestown Makes It

People in the Virginia Colony started getting rich from tobacco. John Rolfe developed a sweet variety of tobacco that was very popular in England. But growing tobacco required a lot of people and many Englishmen didn't want to work in the fields. If you were going to get rich growing tobacco, then you needed a lot of people working for you; the more people working, the more tobacco you grew and sold, the more money you made. This made servants and workers very valuable.

People in the Virginia Colony did what they could to get people to come from England, but because so many colonists died, it was hard to convince them. So the Virginia colonists started paying for people to come. Many of these people were poor who worked as indentured servants; others were criminals who were let out of jail if they agreed to go to Virginia. Indentured servants worked for four to seven years to pay back the money it cost for them to travel across the Atlantic, and then they were free.

The first Africans came to Virginia in 1619 on a Dutch ship. They were sold to the colonists and treated like indentured servants, later earning their freedom. But over time the colonists began thinking of making black people into slaves. Indians were not good slaves; they would run away. It was harder for black slaves to run away; everything was new and strange to them. And it was cheaper to buy slaves than to keep paying for workers; this probably seemed like a good idea to people who wanted to get rich growing tobacco. Eventually laws were passed to trap black people into slavery.